I'm partial to examples on stuff like this, so as I work through this I intend to add some; for example, under the creation of the image: You can name the image whatever you would like, and likely set the size in GB, so the command to create an image named "arch-standard" with a size of 10G would be: qemu-img create -f qcow2 arch-standard.qcow2 10G This will create an image in your current directory; this image file will not be 10G, but something substantially smaller.